Bones

Bones whitened, partially buried in sand under slipping sunsets, hollowed of birds or heavy as femurs, I am only that water held into dimpled flesh upon the frail structure of long spine and the thin pars that have failed me.

There is here, in Astoria a Lindsay Bones who gathers the dead squirrels and owls in order to taxidermy and preserve their lifeless eyes in forever gaze and the other Lindsay Feathers who makes her music of lifting, light, fly-away, white notes on a faded, cherry-wood guitar as she wears pink scarves, miner’s black boots and a dude-ranch cowboy hat of the seventies. Thrift-store charms.

For an amulet of sorts, he waves a bone before smudging the dark corridor with sage, a man who looks like Santa Claus, with wrist tattoos and Gaelic writing, wrapping round, he is a self-professed shaman and reiki master who lets me know, he at very least, charges fifty an hour.

There are the long, light bird bones I gathered off Sand Island along with the miniature bleached sand-dollars I’ve arranged most beautifully upon my mantel alongside the topaz I gathered in the Utah desert, the violets I planted in black soil.